Presentation – Flûte Alors! Being the best recorder player you can be Tips and tricks for getting the most out of your practice and tackling difficult passages Good morning everyone. My name is Sarah Jeffery, and I am a recorder player living and working in the Netherlands. You may know me from my youtube channel ‘Team Recorder’ – aside from this, I also perform concerts and teach. This all means that I have had to practice a lot of notes in my lifetime, often in busy periods without much free time to practice, so I’m here to share my advice and tips with you! I’m going to help you figure out how to get the most out of your practice time, including when to practice, how much time to spend, and what you should exactly be doing. After that, I’ll give you a bunch of tips for conquering a difficult passage of music. The main question people as me is how much time should they spend on practice. Ten minutes every day? Two hours per week? Six hours per day?? The simple answer… well, there is none. There is no hard and fast rule for how much practice one ‘should’ be doing, as it will differ wildly due to circumstances – if you are an amateur or professional, how much music you have to prepare, if it’s for an audition, exam, concert or just for fun, and your own particular style of working. As a general rule, practicing little and often is the best method. In order to improve, one needs to practice regularly. That is just the truth. What we are looking for is the balance between: practicing enough that you can effectively improve, but not so much that you get frustrated, bored, or even worse: injured. It can help to take a look at your schedule and answer these questions for yourself: do you have a lesson or rehearsal to prepare for? When is your free time in the days leading up to that? Do you prefer to play in the morning when you wake up, or are you a night owl? If you have a long day at work, does practicing your instrument stress you out , or does it help you to relax and unwind? It can also really help to identify for yourself your ‘optimum practice duration’. Personally I like to have a good couple of hours free where I can play uninterrupted – then I can spend some time getting ‘in the zone’, and I have a much better practice session for it. Other people find success with the pomodoro method – working in a focused manner for 25 minutes, before taking a 5 minute break (and repeating if wished). I often find that starting is the hardest part – once I’m going, I can practice for longer than I thought. Try aiming for 10 minutes per day (it may well turn into 25) and you
will be amazed with how you improve! Make it easier for yourself by having a dedicated practice space – your music stand, instrument and sheet music all set up and ready to go. I’ll close this section with an example from… DuoLingo. This is a popular language learning app that I am currently using to learn Welsh. The app prompts you (through sms and email) to spend 5 minutes per day learning – and I almost always find that when I begin, I spend about 20 minutes. Regular, little and often is thus a great way to build a sustainable practice routine. Of course, how long you practice isn’t the most important thing. It’s much better to cultivate a healthy practising habit , than just focusing on ‘more, more, more’. How you spend the practice time is important– and I have a plan for you! <shows practice plan, either on screen or printed out?> This is a study plan I got from my teacher in England, Annabel Knight, when I was studying for my bachelor degree there. It helped me to figure out a practice structure for myself, and was invaluable to me! It basically breaks up practice time into eight segments, to give an overview of the different topics you can choose to tackle. You don’t have to do them all in one session, or even in one lifetime. But it can really help to give an overview. Box one is the part that I do always try and do every practice session – a warm up. I find that if I spend 5 minutes warming up, I am so much more concentrated, my practice is more effective, and I don’t get as many physical aches and pains. Try it – you’ll be amazed! I will demonstrate my short warm up session: - demonstrate physical stretches – long notes – finger trills – short scales Box eight is the other really important one – your pieces! After all, making music is the reason we are all here. It says ‘with a view to performance’, but even if you never intend to set foot on a stage, it just means that you are aiming for the highest standard you can reach for yourself. One note – how many pieces should you tackle at once? I personally like two or three. I like to have one piece almost finished, one in progress, and one new, and then work in a cycle where I replace a finished piece with a new one. This also works with two pieces. You may prefer to focus on one at a time, or you may need to study piles of music for a concert, but for myself I found this to be the most effective method. Let’s have a look at the other sections. Box 2 is ‘studies’ – basically technical exercises written out as pieces so that they are enjoyable to play. This is a list of common ones for the recorder.
Box 3 is one of the most valuable – scales! Boring, right? But if you know your scales, you can automatically play around 60% of all baroque repertoire, for example. It helps with fingers dexterity, articulation, co ordination, your ear and harmonic knowledge... Try five minutes per day, it’s like going to the recorder gym! Boxes 4, 5 and 7 are the three building blocks of recorder playing: fingers, air, and tongue. They all work together to make music, but spending time on each one separately can increase your ‘toolbox’ for creating musical expression dramatically. After all, one big reason for spending time on technique is so that you can use it to create the sound you want to hear! Box 6 is ‘skills’ - concrete things such as transposition (between alto and soprano, but also playing recorders in keys such as D and G), ornamentation, improvisation in different styles, contemporary and extended techniques… feel free to add to the list. Now, how to use this study plan - you definitely do not have to do it all every day! If I have just a few minutes, I may choose box 1, to stay in shape. In a normal practice session, I may use box 1 and then box 8, working on say two pieces. If I have more time, I may box box 1 and 8, plus another box that relates the pieces I am working on. For a Vivaldi concerto, box 3 (scales) and 4 (fingers) could be useful. For practicing Bach, maybe I want to use box 5 (air) and box 6 (ornamentation). And so on – feel free to make your own combinations! Of course, don’t forget to just let this all go from time to time and have fun – box 8, playing through the music you love. This brings me to my last point – the different between active and passive practice. Passive is where you are simply playing through, not really aiming to work on anything. This is so important too! Let go, relax, and play. I like to grab a pile of sonatas and do this from time to time. Active practice is where you are concentrated, and evaluating yourself with a view to improvement. That is the state you are aiming for when working on a piece. Play a small segment – a phrase, for example – and give yourself feedback. What did you like, and why? Choose one thing to listen out for and improve the next time you play it – tuning, that tricky note, vibrato, dynamics. Then try and implement that one thing. Hey, you can even use the study plan to practice this element separately! Don’t try and improve everything at once, because you will be overwhelmed! My last tip when you are sitting down to practice is for concentration. When you’ve figured out what, when, and how long to practice for, that is already excellent preparation. But make sure you are able to concentrate too! A few tips: - make sure you have a quiet, uninterrupted room or space to play, and let your family or housemates know not to disturb you if possible. - - again the warm up: I can’t overstate how important a few minutes of warm up can be, for forgetting the stresses of daily life and getting into concentrated mode.
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